1. Field of the invention
The present invention relates to an instrument for measuring blood cell deformability. More particularly, a disposable blood test kit is provided to avoid a washing process during a blood test.
2. Related prior art
As the blood cell deformability is recently known to affect the viscosity and various characteristic of the blood cell directly, research is actively attempted to develop the measuring device for the blood cell deformability.
Especially, a journal entitled Clinical Hemorheology and Microcirculation (Vol. 14, pp. 605-618, 1994) introduces a Laser-Assisted Optical Rotational Cell Analyzer (LORCA) formed as a concentric dual tube of a rotary Couette flow system for measuring the blood cell deformability. This device emits a laser beam to the blood cell during rotation and captures the diffracted image by a CCD camera for analyzing by the computer programming and for measuring the blood cell deformability.
Because the shear force or shear rate applied to the blood cell varies according to the spinning speed, it is required repeatedly to measure the shear force or shear rate of the blood cell at the various ranges of the spinning speed.
The conventional device has a disadvantage in that the surface of the instrument contacted with the blood sample must be washed after the experiment.
Further, another journal entitled Blood Cells, Molecules and Diseases (Vol. 28, pp. 373-384) introduces a blood cell deforming distribution tester (ARCA). A diluted blood sample is injected between the spinning parallel disks of the ARCA to capture through a microscopic CCD camera the images that illustrate the blood cell deformation by the shearing forces due to the spinning speed. Then, the distribution of the blood cell deformation is obtained by the curve-fitting computer program through the analysis of the clearly captured images depending on the various shearing forces.
This conventional device also has as a disadvantage that it takes one to two hours to analyze the captured images of the blood samples, and the surface of the instrument contacted with the blood sample must be washed after the experiment.
On the other hand, a common problem of the conventional instruments is that the surface of the instrument contacted with the blood sample must be washed after each experiment. Thus, it is inconvenient and burdensome to maintain the sanitary instrument after washing.
Further, special training is required to operate such conventional instruments, and professional instruction is required to analyze the blood samples. Thus, such conventional instruments are not suitable for practical use in a clinical setting.